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April 7, 2008 6:04 AM PDT

The GPL's poor translation into French

by Matt Asay
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The cheekiness/gall of Free/Iliad is almost shocking.

Free/Iliad is a billion-dollar French ISP that is taking sophistry to new depths. In response to a cease and desist letter that it either stop distributing with its arguments about why it's entitled to heavily modify software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) without contributing back its modifications, as Pierre writes.

What's of particular interest here is the way Mr. Niel [Free's founder] argues the GPL is irrelevant to this case. His claims is [sic] roughly this: my 3,000,000 GPLoaded-home routers are part of my network therefore the GPL doesn't apply since I don't distribute any software outside of my network.

Oh, really?

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About The Open Road

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to the Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

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